Obamacare repeal vote fails in Senate

The Senate on Sunday voted down a Republican effort to repeal Obamacare, the GOP’s first attempt to get rid of the president’s health law since the party took control of the chamber in January.

The effort fell 49-43, exactly along party lines, with eight senators not voting in the rare weekend session. Three-fifths of the Senate would have had to vote to add Obamacare repeal to a highway funding bill.

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Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) is expected to ask the Senate — likely Monday — to reconsider the Obamacare amendment. He would propose a procedural motion to change Senate rules in order to try to repeal the Affordable Care Act with just 51 votes.

Such a momentous change in the Senate’s rules is unlikely. But conservatives have suggested that they would chastise Republicans who would block a rule change that could lead to repealing the health law that they detest.

Republican Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) all initially voted against repeal but changed their votes within minutes after the apparent mistakes. Paul’s aide was spotted on the floor talking with the senator after the initial vote was cast. Collins and Sasse corrected their votes at the same time and shared comments on the Senate floor.

Other than that, Sunday’s repeal vote played out as expected. No Republican or Democrat has expressed any hint that they would break from their party’s firmly held position on Obamacare.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) predicted that outcome on Friday as he railed against Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s decision to hold the vote, saying it was done to placate conservatives who were angry that another vote was called to authorize the Export-Import bank.

“We’ll have a vote on repealing Obamacare. The Republicans will all vote yes, the Democrats will all vote no. It will be at a 60-vote threshold, it will fail,” Cruz said then. “It will be an exercise in meaningless political theater.”

Yet the vote does allow Republicans — particularly freshman lawmakers — to say that they’ve cast a vote to repeal the ACA. Several had said they wanted a chance to get on the record on a campaign promise they’d all made.

“What I’m trying to do in my short time here is look at the commitments I made to the constituents and voters of Alaska and follow through on those commitments,” first-term Sen. Dan Sullivan said last week. “And that was a commitment, and I want to follow through on it.”

But Sullivan, like many other Republicans, also said he’d like to see the Senate act on changes to the health law that have a chance of becoming law, such as repealing its medical-device tax or changing its definition of “full time” work from 30 hours to 40 hours.

“Obviously a full repeal and replace is going … to be unsuccessful,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) said before the vote was scheduled. “So I would like to see us do things like move the work week to 40 hours.”

Democrats used Sunday’s vote as an opportunity to praise the health care law.

“The House has voted 55 times. The Supreme Court said it’s fine. We’re reaching 20 million Americans who now have health care,” Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) said Friday. Repeal “would hurt too many people, it would create chaos.”

The Senate has voted three other times on legislation to fully repeal Obamacare — in March 2010, February 2011 and March 2013. All were on party lines. The Senate has voted about three dozen times on bills to repeal or defund all or part of the health care law since it was passed in 2010.